


Alprazolam

by fuckityfrank



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Drug Addiction, Drug Use, F/M, M/M, Unfortunate endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 13:39:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6660337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckityfrank/pseuds/fuckityfrank
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think it's time for a change."</p><p>If Frank could have just looked inside Gerard's head, maybe he wouldn't have made some of the choices he did... Or maybe he would have made more preventative ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“I think it’s time for a change.”

Gerard slowly tosses a dirty shirt and a bottle of vodka into a loud, floral patterned, beach bag. The bottle lands softly on the absurd assortment of clothing items already occupying the bottom of the bag.

“Time for a fucking change?” Lindsey retorts, her face warped in disgust. Her hands are clenched at her sides.

A pair of jeans, his toothbrush, and a tattered journal are shoved into the bag. He stops moving and stares at the flower petals. The multi-colored bag is obviously way brighter than their future together.

Her eyes narrow impossibly smaller and she hisses through her teeth.

“You sleep with your best friend once while I’m gone and now you exclusively fuck men? Is that it?”

Gerard doesn’t look at her for a long time, instead he stands staring down into the pages of the journal that had landed half open in the bag.

He is lost in his drawings longer than Lindsey’s patience will allow. She lunges forward and grabs Gerard’s arm.

He finally stares up at her. She expects hurt or anger but all she sees are his distant, bewildered eyes.

She drops his arm like it just burned her.

“You’re back on pills too?”

He frowns and bends over, collecting a pair of mismatched socks and a hairbrush that he had probably only used once since he’d bought it. He shrugs at her, opens his top dresser drawer, and retrieves a pill bottle. He drops them, rattling all the way, into the bag.  
“Don’t want to discuss it.”

Her ferocity hits a new high. She tenses her arms and jabs them forcefully downward, willing herself not to hit him. Letting out an enraged wail that ends in a sob, she turns to walk out the door of their bedroom, but circles back around.

“If you go to him…If you take your fucking pills and that vodka bottle you’ve been kissing more than me,” She stops and takes a shaky breath. “If you walk out this door with them right now…you never come back here.”

He stares at her absently. As tears begin leaking down her face, she turns away from him, hugging her elbow to her chest and covering her mouth with her palm. Without looking at him, she whispers around the fingers hiding her face.

“Whatever choice you make right now, Gerard, you better fucking remember it.”

Quietly, he slides the straps of the bag over his shoulder. He scuffs his feet across the carpet on his way towards her, moving impossibly slow. He brushes his lips tenderly across her uncovered cheek and walks towards the front door.  
He never looks back as he shuts the door behind him and with it, Lindsey’s involvement in his life.


	2. Chapter 2

Gerard and Frank flee Jersey, leaving furniture, friends, and an overwhelming number of voicemails behind.

Gerard’s pretty sure they end up in California. He can’t be positive when they first get there though. They’d been driving west on interstate 40 for a long time. They slept in the car on the side of the road in Missouri on the first night. They woke up roasting in the summer heat, even though the windows were down. Gerard kind of wishes they’d baked in the car and that someone had found them with their brains leaking out their ears.

They make minimal stops, usually Frank pulling over for 5 or so minutes so one of them can piss in the bushes. Sometimes they hit a fast food place and stop for a while. When they are out of the car, Frank never sits down and complains about his ass falling asleep the whole time. They always end up back in the car, back on the road.

.::.::.::.

When he wakes up again, Frank’s still driving. He wonders how Frank can drive for so long and not get tired. Why doesn’t he ever ask him to drive? How long has it been? Two days? Three days? He probably couldn’t drive even if Frank did ask him. He’s almost out of pills. He doesn’t think they ran out this fast last time.

He catches a worried look from Frank before he lets his head hit the headrest and his eyes slip shut again. He feels around in his lap and then around the seat until he finds a plastic water bottle. There isn’t a lot of searching involved for his next target. He slips his hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small, orange bottle with a white cap. He shakes a few Xanax into his hand and throws them back, quickly washing the gritty, acrid taste out of his mouth with warm water from the bottle. He vaguely remembers Lindsey telling him that the max legal dose of Xanax for one day is 4 mg. He just knocked back 16 mg. He wonders when Frank will stop again. He wonders if he will remember this trip. He doesn’t think it matters anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

When Gerard runs out of pills on the 4th day, he’s out for good. He doesn’t have any hook-ups here. He doesn’t even have anywhere to live. The detox is hard, but Frank is soft and patient, guiding him through it and into the 5th day. If Gerard’s being honest, he misses the obliviousness. If Frank’s being honest, he misses Gerard.

.::.::.::.

It takes 2 more days of crappy food and long, restless nights in the car for Frank to find a shitty apartment where the management will take the $300 cash that they have and let them pay the rest later.

They spend the night in the living room, resting on three sleeping bags stacked together with a quilt that Gerard’s grandmother made covering them.Gerard lays awake staring at the water stains on the ceiling.

The next day they buy a mattress and Frank puts it on a credit card. The day after that Frank looks for a job.  
When he find’s one, Gerard spirals.

.::.::.::.

Frank’s gone 10 hours a day, working his ass off bussing tables to support them. During those 10-hour days, Gerard looks for a hook-up, not the job he says he’s searching for. Some days he just lays in their bed, feeling guilty that he convinced Frank to do this in the first place. He wanted to throw away his own life…why did he steal Franks too?

.::.::.::.

He finds a dealer in a disgusting club on a Friday afternoon. When he comes home, he sits on the bed with a Ziploc full of Xanax. He opens it and turns it upside down. The powdery white bars spill out of the bag and fill his palm. For a while, he thinks too hard about things that are too dark to be healthy. Will Frank will go back to Jamia and beg her forgiveness when he’s gone?

.::.::.::.

“Gee?”

Gerard can’t open his eyes. He’s vaguely aware someone is shaking his shoulders... Frank’s shaking his shoulders.

“Gerard!”

The rough jostling is harder now, but he just wants to fucking sleep. Just wants sleep. He shuts off his mind again.

**Author's Note:**

> A big 'thank you' to Tumblr user [badwolf42mcr](http://badwolf42mcr.tumblr.com) for some beta suggestions that made this fic easier to understand!
> 
> Follow me on [tumblr](http://fr4nkie.co.vu)?


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